Gotta Do More, Gotta Be More
by Yawping Stance
Summary: TWOSHOT. Pitts and Meeks think on Neil's death. Second Pitts taken down! Rating for obvious character death. Nonslash. COMPLETE.
1. Pitts: Gotta Do More, Gotta Be More

**Disclaimer: However much I _wish _I owned DPS (other than on DVD), particularly Nuwanda, I don't.**

A/N: Okay, something I came up with at 10 at night. It should probably be burned, but oh well. I really don't care with this one.

"Gotta do more, gotta be more."

But in that smoky cave, we're just being us. Living for the moment while the self-proclaimed "ladies' man" of the group goes on with a saxophone solo that's actually pretty good. And Knox wonders _why _women swoon! I really need to get out into the air with all this smoke, it's bound to be bad on my asthma, but I'm just so transfixed in the moment that I don't care. I look around the cave and it's sort of the stereotypical guys' club.

The ladies' man, as I said before, and the hopeless romantic who's bound to have written something about the girl he's been stalking (although he refuses to admit that it's stalking), our fearless leader whose idea it'd been to come to the old Indian cave in the first place, the nerd...geek...whatever you want to call him, but he's my friend. Then there's the one that's so painfully shy that his quietness is almost annoying. But who am I to talk? I hardly say more than twenty words at a time. Is quietness even a word? Me, I'm just the quiet gangly one, but I enjoy every minute of it. I wish desperately that this night, this moment, could last forever. Because right now, we're not thinking of becoming doctors or lawyers or bankers or pleasing our fathers. We've just abandoned ourselves to the moment and, for once, we _are_ more. For once in our lifetimes, we're living up to our own expectations and no one else's. Not our fathers, not our brothers, not our teachers. Just us.

"Pitts? _Pittsie?_" I'm jerked from my thoughts as I look up at Nuwanda.

"Huh?"

"Didn't you hear what I said?" I blush with shame as I wipe the tears out of my eyes, only to feel more come.

"Yeah." I feel like such a girl as my chin trembles and I try to keep back the tears. "Are they sure? I mean, absolutely positive?"

"What do you mean, '_are they sure_'?" Nuwanda's face grew red with anger and more tears. "_Are they sure_ he's dead? Yes, they're sure! How can you _not_ be sure, with a _bullet_ lodged in his brain! How can you-" he choked for a minute, and when he spoke again, his voice was a little above a strangled whisper, quivering with tears. "How can you _not_ be sure?" He turned away from the rest of us.

We weren't allowed to see him cry, no one was. He was _Nuwanda_, and Nuwanda didn't cry! But Charlie Dalton did. Finally, I let my tears go, too, as Charlie collapsed onto Steven's bed, sobbing. Just hours ago, we'd all seen him, invigorated from his triumph on stage. And now, I'd just received news that he was dead. Shot himself in the head. My body was numb all over, I couldn't believe it..._wouldn't_ believe it.

"It was his father," I said angrily, trying to keep the tears in my voice to a minimum. "His father made him do it. If it weren't for his father, he'd be happy and alive and...oh, God!" I buried my face in my knees as I curled up and started crying again. I felt Steven's hand on my shoulder.

-x-

"But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red! Where on the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead." Neil read the poem aloud. Being curious where Keating had gotten his title of "captain," we decided to look up the poem he had mentioned. I furrowed my brows as I listened, wondering why Keating had picked such a depressing poem. "But I with mournful tread walk the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead," Neil finished.

"Well, now that that's outta the way," Nuwanda said, pulling out yet another centerfold with a poem on it. No respect for the classics, but that was fine. This wasn't about the classics, it was about us and our poetry and what we felt.

-x-

"Look, there's something here called an honor code, and that means that if a teacher asks you a question, you tell them the truth!" Cameron stood defending himself. Charlie sucker punched him, and I almost did the same as Cameron scrambled to his feet out of harms way. "You just signed your expulsion papers, _Nuwanda_! But you guys aren't too late to save yourselves, and if you were smart, you'd do the same thing I did!" Meeks put a hand on my shoulder, seeing me tense up.

"He's not worth the expulsion," he whispered in my ear. I took a deep breath and counted to ten before even saying anything, and by that time Cameron was long gone.

"It's not fair," I muttered. Knox and Charlie turned around and looked at me.

"What was that?" Knox asked.

"It's not fair," I repeated, a little louder. "I mean, it's all Mr. Perry's fault and who's getting blamed for it? The Captain! If Mr. Perry had just let Neil act in that play, then none of this would've happened. I mean, they're just blaming the Captain because they need a scapegoat, that's all! He had _nothing_ to do with Neil dying! _Nothing_!" I flop down onto a couch and put my face in my hands and my elbows on my knees. "And that little brown nosing, shoe licking _fink_ isn't helping things any by tattling to the administration!"

"Pitts!" Even Charlie's eyebrows were raised in shock. None of them had heard me call anybody a name before, never mind string more than two sentences together.

"What, Charlie? You expect me to sit around and just take crap from him?" I pointed so suddenly at the door that Steven flinched and Knox had to jump a foot to the left to avoid getting poked in the eye. "No. I'm putting the blame where it belongs, this time! It's Mr. Perry, and the Administration, and no one else!"

"Alright, Gerard, we believe you," Steven said, patting my shoulder a little. I could tell he was still a little afraid of me. He wasn't called Meeks for no reason.

Except for Nuwanda, for obvious reasons, the rest of the Dead Poets were asked to speak at Neil's funeral. Most of them were short and to the point. "Neil was a good, dedicated friend," blah, blah, blah. When I got up to the podium, it was like a lump of the notoriously sticky Hellton oatmeal was stuck in my throat. I swallowed hard and tried to keep my voice steady, unsuccessfully.

"Neil was...a wonderful friend, a wonderful person. I don't think there was anyone that didn't like him. He was a friend, a leader, a confidante, and most importantly, his own person. And, although the title of "Captain" belongs to someone else, and some of you know who I'm talking about, some of you don't, I've lived that night over and over in my head, and the more I think about it, the more that I think that this fits perfectly." I cleared my throat and pulled out a piece of notebook paper with my messy scrawl on it. "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weather'd every rack; the prize we sought is won;"

-Fin-


	2. Meeks: What God?

**Disclaimer: Don't own anything except the DVD.**

A/N: Decided not to make this a oneshot, cuz I could. Meeks is my official favorite character, so I decided to do something with him, too. This one is to those out there that've ever had a crisis of faith. More to come, but I dunno when. I would also like to announce that I've revamped my profile and there is now a Rant of the Week, to be posted every week on completely arbitrary topics. Go ahead, clicky!

_What God?_

"His grades are suffering, Neil!"

"Then you'll help him, _Meeks_! Forget it, Pittsie, you're in."

I rolled my eyes and jogged along, giving up on trying to convince our self-proclaimed leader to back down. But what Neil was proposing was suicide!

"S-s-_suicide_?" I couldn't believe my ears.

"Shot himself in the head." Charlie gulped back his tears. I blinked and cleaned my glasses on my flannel shirt.

"But...but that's not like him, that's not Neil. Neil...it's someone else, it has to be. I mean, the chances of there being another Neil Perry are high and...and..." I broke off and looked down, trying to discretely wipe the tears away. I took off my glasses again and cleaned them on my shirt, wiping my eyes on my sleeve.

I looked over at Gerard's fuzzy sleeping form and remembered how hard Neil and I had worked with him to keep his grades up to keep him in the club, then I just couldn't stop it anymore. I couldn't stop the tears, couldn't stop the thoughts rushing through my head, all these illogical thoughts. I wasn't supposed to think this way, I'd never been prepared for it because it wasn't supposed to happen. Neil was supposed to graduate and go to Harvard and become a doctor and live. But it'd been stopped short. I couldn't believe..._wouldn't_ believe it'd been by his own hand.

"It's not possible. It's not Neil, it's not him at all. I mean, what cause would he have? _What cause?_ Not just acting, he'd know better than that. He...he..." I shook my head and buried my face in my hands. All these thoughts running through my mind...it was illogical, it wasn't black and white. Just the shady gray area, and I _refuse _to believe in that. _Everything_ could be explained somehow, I knew it! But...this...it couldn't be explained.

-x-

"'I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.'" Neil read for the first time the poem by Thoreau that hadn't been read by a Dead Poet for nearly twenty years. I sat looking up at him in wonder. We'd really done it, we'd reconvened the Dead Poets Society. I took my glasses off to clean them and quickly replaced them. I can't help but have a foreboding feeling, though. I'm conscious of the rules and make an effort to obey them. I, however, unlike Cameron, don't harp on it.

"_Suck all the marrow out of life"_ I thought. _Carpe diem, Meeksie. You've obeyed the rules all your life. One night isn't gonna hurt you_.

He was blaming the Captain for all of it! That little Fink! He'd seen the ship sinking, so he hangs the innocent to save himself! As I saw Gerard tense up next to me, I put a hand on his shoulder.

"He isn't worth the expulsion," I muttered into his ear, standing on tiptoe to reach it. He nodded slightly and relax. Quite honestly, I don't think there was a man in that room who _didn't_ want to hit him, but I knew that'd get me nowhere but a new boarding school, a stricter one. And anything stricter than Welton...well, I just couldn't handle that.

Gerard read a poem at Neil's funeral. No, not _a_ poem, _the _poem. "O Captain! My Captain!" And, indeed, Neil had been our captain.

"But I with mournful tread walk the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead."

I felt a tear run beneath my glasses, and was glad I'd already gone up. For some reason, all I could think about was Latin and hi-fi systems. Coping mechanism, I guess. But it bothered me that at Neil's own services, I couldn't muster it up to think about him.

"God works in mysterious ways," the preacher went up to the podium to speak.

_God?_ I thought. _What God? What makes God so special that everyone worships Him? What if there isn't a God, what then? I mean, He's only an idea, nothing more. He's never been proven. And I am a man of proof and science. Besides, if there was a God, why didn't He stop Neil from killing himself? Why didn't He show him other ways out?_ I furrowed my brow, crossed my arms, and slumped down in my seat. _What God?_

-Fin-


End file.
